This invention relates to a method of detecting the space between printed words by using an optical alphanumeric character reader.
According to the conventional method of using an optical alphanumeric character reader, the space between two mutually adjacent words is identified on the basis of a threshold value which, if a document printed with a fixed pitch is inputted, is obtained from this pitch and, if the inputted document has been prepared by left-justifying and right-justifying each line and uniformizing the distances between each pair of mutually adjacent words, is obtained from a value representing the line height. In general, most printed documents are both left-justified and right-justified rather than have a fixed pitch, but the aforementioned conventional method of determining the space between words is frequently not satisfactory especially if the separation between words changes for the same line height or varies significantly within the same line or if there are variations in the space between neighboring letters. This is basically because the conventional method of determining an optimum threshold value from the line height is not adequate. If the space between words fails to be accurately recognized, the beginning of a word may be identified incorrectly and this causes a spell check and other subsequent word identification processes to become invalid and useless.